In his now-famous coming-out letter, Frank Ocean describes the life-changing effects of his first love. An unnamed, unspecified soundtrack is crucial to this experience: “I reminisced about the sentimental songs I enjoyed when I was a teenager. The ones I played when I experienced a girlfriend for the first time. I realized they were written in a language I did not yet speak.” We all know this language, even if we, like Frank Ocean, don’t speak it yet: mundane, inane, relentless, at once unfulfillable and disappointingly true. “Morning” draws on some of these sentimental songs, their teenage repetitivity, their unspeakable bathos and unavoidable sincerity. Its title and structure are taken from another Frank — this one’s O’Hara: “I’ve got to tell you / how I love you always.” I wanted to write a text caught between being completely poignant and completely flattened. I wanted to write in a language I did not yet speak. I wanted a text whose retrospection and repetition would not slide into critical superiority and hauteur. I wanted a text that would be as machine-like as love, doing it over and over again.